Wednesday, April 28, 2004

Here in 1st Brigade land we attend memorial services, walk by the flag at half-staff for weeks on end and steel ourselves everytime the phone or doorbell rings.

These folks...they react that way to the comics.

For the first time in his comic-strip existence, B.D., one of the original characters of the Doonesbury strip, appeared last Wednesday without his trademark helmet.

And without his left leg.

The former college quarterback was sent to Iraq by his creator, Garry Trudeau, then left unconscious from the blast of an apparent roadside bomb. The fictional B.D. joins more than 3,630 real soldiers who have been wounded in Iraq, according to the Pentagon...

Last Wednesday, the sight of B.D. maimed, minus his ever-present helmet (college football, Army, Rams third stringer, highway patrolman, Army again, football coach, etc.), left e-mailers to the Doonesbury Web site "breathless," "crying," and feeling "like it happened to a friend." A former combat medic in Vietnam pleaded, "Bring B.D. home alive."

Another fan wrote that the strip "puts a finger of reality on the cold news of today, and contrasts starkly with the blather from the White House."